I often do rudimentary image manipulations on digital photographs, website images and program graphics and artwork. In the past I've used the following programs for that purpose:

• ArcSoft PhotoStudio 5
• Microsoft PhotoDraw
• Microsoft Paint

But I've recently started using the awesome Paint.NET program instead, and so far I'm very impressed. It has all the features I need, plus it's a free, open-sourced .NET application written in C#. So if I find a technique in the program that I want to exploit in my own code, I can dive into the source code and find out how it was implemented.

You can download Paint.NET here. Paint.NET requires the .NET 2.0 framework. A version for .NET 3.0 is under development.